Top Ten Reasons School Counselors Want Students to Read: Social-Emotional Learning Opportunities! by Sarah Scheerger

When we read, we climb into the minds and bodies of our characters. We feel with them and we feel for them. I explain empathy to students as follows: Empathy is the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes and imagining how you might feel if you were in a similar situation. This is different from sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone else. Cultivating empathy is a way to combat bullying. Reading offers a way to understand another’s behavioral choices through first understanding the underlying feelings and thoughts that propel that behavior.

Books offer a “window,” a chance to peek into someone else’s reality and feel with and for them.

Normalization of feelings, and increasing self-understanding

I tell my students that all feelings are okay. Experiencing emotion is part of what makes us human. There is no such thing as a “bad” or “wrong” emotion. Even unpleasant emotions like anger, jealousy, anxiety, and greed are still human emotions.

Emotions can be expressed in a variety of ways. For example, while anger is a normal/human emotion, there are both healthy and unhealthy expressions of anger. Through literature, we experience a range of emotions along with the characters. Tolerating and coping with those emotions builds resilience and self-regulation. Being able to identify and label a wide range of emotional states fosters increased self-expression.

Reducing Isolation within an experience. (You are not alone).

In kidlit circles, we call this a “mirror”—a chance to see yourself or your own experience within a character’s life. Watching a character survive and thrive despite challenging situations is empowering.

Modeling creates learning opportunities

By reading books, children learn both through both positive and negative examples. The positive examples help foster goal-setting and creative thinking. The negative examples teach cause and effect as well as consequences. Learning through characters may help our students avoid some of their own mistakes.

Opening Possibilities and Choice

In books, and for characters, anything is possible. The sky’s the limit. We want our students to reach for the stars. To live in a world where anything is possible, and doubt can’t hold them back. Also, in books characters are often faced with multiple choices and they have to weigh their options.

Increasing feelings of self-efficacy

Often child main characters in books wind up solving their own problems (or even save the world). This increases youth empowerment. As we see in real youth of today, they know how to stand up for what they believe in. Anything is possible.

Main characters learn and grow through the course of their story. They often find their voices and figure out what kind of human beings they want to be. Our students are in the process of finding their own identities as well.

Healthy Coping Skills

Both reading and writing are excellent coping skills. It’s important for youth to find ways to self-regulate their emotional states and to help themselves feel better when upset. Reading can take us into a meditative, calm state. Opening a book can be a welcome distraction from stress and feelings of loneliness. Writing is an excellent form of self-expression and can help us process and integrate our life experiences.

Instillation of Hope / Lack of Permanence / Perspective

The characters in literature go through trials and tribulations that are often temporary states. This brings an understanding of lack of permanence. The idea that “it gets better”. This increases the chances that students can keep their own ups and downs of life in perspective.

By nature, kids are ego-centric. They focus on their own experiences, which are then relative to their own previous experiences. This is partially what makes some things feel like a “big deal”, which in retrospect are not that big of a deal. As we age, life and experience put things in perspective for us all. Students don’t yet have that longevity, so “glitches” feel like catastrophes. Watching literary characters survive hardships and take control of their lives can help give perspective and instill hope in our students.

Increase insight and understanding

If we adults could go back in time, we’d all have some weighty advice for our younger selves. Sadly, we mostly have to make our own mistakes to learn. But through literature, we’re essentially living through someone else’s experience in a visceral way. We’re hearing the character’s innermost thoughts. This type of experience can foster insight and understanding in ways that our parents’ lectures cannot.

Perspective taking

When reading literature, we not only connect with the main character and see his/her perspective, but we often can understand the motivations of other, more minor characters. This ability to take multiple perspectives is a very important social-emotional skill; it helps with negotiation and problem-solving skills, it cultivates more empathy.

As a school-based counselor, I’ve had the pleasure of walking into classrooms where teachers are incorporating RJ Palacio’s “Wonder” as a stepping stone for empathy, choices, and personal responsibility. These skilled teachers are able to intertwine social-emotional learning opportunities into literature.

Sarah Scheerger is a school-based counselor in Southern California, helping students figure out who they are, and who they want to be. Her middle-grade debut, Operation Frog Effect (Penguin Random House) releases in February but is available for pre-order now. Keep an eye out for her new picture book, “Mitzvah Pizza” (Kar-Ben) which launches in April. Both of these new releases offer opportunities for social-emotional learning. In addition to MG and PBs, Sarah also writes YA. To learn more, visit www.sarahlynnbooks.com

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18 Comments

Sarah, As I was reading your post, I was thinking Operation Frog Effect would be a perfect example of the type of book you were describing. It’s such a coincidence that you wrote this post! I loved your book so much and wrote a long review on Instagram. I wish you much success!

In the UK, we celebrate Empathy Day in June. I just spent time planning activities for our years 7-10 (11-15 year olds) around these same issues using passages from selected titles aimed at getting students to look at life through someone else’s eyes, putting themselves in someone else’s shoes.

This article is so powerful! Counselors and teachers play a huge role in students’ overall development of character and self-worth. Empowerment was the main concept that stuck out to me while reading this article. Providing students opportunities to self-reflect in efforts to develop and enhance their own identities is a life skill that students desperately need. Literature is the perfect avenue to engage learners in an experience that develops social, emotional, and cultural awareness preparing them for a society of differences and similarities that foster empathy and acceptance for others. Due to our high percentage of English learners and various cultures represented in our classrooms, culturally relevant texts are essential for fostering empathy, acceptance, and for empowering our learners. When students feel valued and can share their backgrounds in a low risk setting, engagement and success will increase. Read alouds are the perfect opportunity for counselors and teachers to provide paths to characters that are representative of all cultures in our classrooms. Collaborative efforts will ensure that students receive access to authentic and relevant literature allowing social, emotional, and cultural awareness skills to increase. Student discourse will be more meaningful and impactful when intentional planning and selection of texts occurs.

Thank you for the article and how reading can impact students. I have five boys, four of which are adopted, and with two a different color then us. One is Hispanic and the other African-American. I love my boys and want to be able to share and relate to everything they go through in life, I know that I cannot. I am realizing more and more the place that reading can become to my boys. The hope that through their reading, it can become a ‘mirror’ into their lives in areas that I cannot relate. I want to become intentional about finding books that will allow them to see themselves and assist in developing their, and my, understanding of their lives. I also related to how books provide a ‘window’ into others lives and allow for discussions about empathy.

In my Pre-K classroom, we focus closely on social and emotional skills, because they teach students how to demonstrate self-control by regulating their own emotions and behaviors while also being able to accurately interpret and communicate the emotions of themselves and others. Understanding these skills can also teach children how to develop and maintain friendships, play cooperatively with peers, resolve peer conflict, and show emerging empathy by providing comfort to peers. These social and emotional skills can build on children’s early literacy skills as they are learning to acquire meaning from a variety of materials read to him/her. When discussing books or stories read aloud and they can identify the characters of a story. These discussions about characters can bring about great opportunities to explore emotions and discuss what the characters are feeling and thinking. In Pre-K we use story symbols to discuss the story’s elements, and one of the elements is a heart that prompts the students to discuss the feelings of the characters. I like the fact that the blog mentions that “modeling creates learning opportunities.” It is important to read books that reflect good and bad behavior because students need to see and understand what both good and bad behavior looks like. A great point was made that students can learn through the characters of a book which can lead to discussions about their feelings when they maybe in the same situations as book characters.